The great French diarist Jules Renard (1864-1910) had small interest in non-literary art forms. When Ravel approached him wanting to set five of his Histoires naturelles, Renard couldn’t see the point; he didn’t forbid it, but declined to go to the premiere. He sat through Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and found it a ‘sombre bore’, its plot ‘puerile’. His attitude to painting was a little more responsive: he admired (and knew) Lautrec, and approved of Renoir; but he found Cézanne barbarous and Monet’s waterlilies ‘girly’. This was less philistinism than a robust admission of his own areas of non-response. And he did write one wonderful thing about painting, on 8 January 1908: ‘When I am in front of a picture, it speaks better than I do.’

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

I am the translator of Degas and His Model, the ‘curious text’ discussed by Julian Barnes in his piece about Degas (LRB, 4 January). On the centenary of Degas’s death, Barnes wants us to let his paintings ‘speak’, and asks us to ‘rein in our chatter’. He treats Degas’s model’s account as emblematic of a litigious contemporary criticism that would substitute moralising and gossip for attention to visual detail.

Barnes argues that concerns about misogyny and objectification in Degas’s work are wrongheaded, since the women who appear in his paintings ‘are not victims of the male gaze but oblivious to it’. They are shown in moments of complicity with other women, or lost in their own inwardness, and portrayed in a way that realistically reflects their lived experience, without erasing their boredom or fatigue. Does it matter that he subjected his models to verbal and physical abuse – and fired them for daring to pose for Jewish artists – if he immortalised their ‘female separateness’? Should this kind of knowledge alter our evaluation of the paintings, a hundred years later? Generations of art historians of diverse backgrounds and critical orientations have wrestled with these questions, including the late Linda Nochlin, who appreciated Degas’s brothel monotypes as much as Barnes does.

But it does seem odd to me that Barnes can vaunt Degas’s representations of female interiority even while pooh-poohing the expression of that interiority by the women themselves. The pictures ‘speak’, but Barnes seems to think that women like Pauline, Degas’s model, can only gossip and chatter. Could he not at least lend them an ear, in the interests of what he calls ‘expanding and continuing the argument’?

A much less significant quibble, but one that is particularly irksome for a translator: Barnes takes issue with my decision to translate this text into American English, implying that so doing somehow troubles its potential value or meaning. I am an American translator translating for an American audience, and the book reflects that, as it does the fact that the original is anything but prim. Perhaps he would have preferred a version in nautical semaphore, Old Church Slavonic or, more probably, the British English spoken at Oxford circa 1965. Perhaps only an exact transcription of the French original would have skirted interpretative difficulties? Fortunately, the text is digitised and freely available on Gallica, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s online repository. Mr Barnes, be the Pierre Menard you want to see in the world!